Image: The Image Centre, Toronto
Madison Chow’s ‘Overflow’ opens on 9 September at The Image Centre’s Student Gallery in Toronto, presenting camera-less photographs made through direct encounters with water. The exhibition runs through 18 October 2026.
Rather than treating lakes and oceans as scenery to be captured, Chow gives water an active role in producing the image. Her camera-less method is intended to challenge conventional ways of photographing nature and, as she describes it, to remove the lens’s traditional colonial gaze from the process. Water becomes a collaborator in its own representation.
The works begin at shorelines, often in the morning. Chow arranges paper with nearby flora, natural objects gathered along the shore, or her own body. Rushing water then meets the paper, slowly carving features into its material with the assistance of natural and artificial UV light. The process brings physical contact, light and moving water into the formation of each image.
Chow describes the results as “self-portraits of one of Earth’s most dynamic elements,” at once abstract records of an uncontrollable force and tangible traces of relationships formed with particular bodies of water over time. Made during visits to freshwater and saltwater sites, the project is part of her pursuit of a respectful and reciprocal way to image the natural world.
The titles ‘Saltwater Lumen #1’ (2024), ‘Saltwater Lumen (Full Body), Pacific Ocean’ (2024) and ‘Freshwater Photogram, Lake Ontario’ (2025) point to the bodies of water informing this body of work. Chow’s practice spans digital, analogue and alternative photographic processes, with an emphasis on the tangibility of photographic objects and on relationships with the natural world.
